OUGD501 // Lecture 12 // Globalisation, Sustainability & the Media

Market is more powerful in influencing decisions of the globe.

Market expand outside of just a country. desirable idea. share the wealth of the world.

Definitions of Globalisation

Socialist

The process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces.

Capitalist

The elimination of state-enforced restrictions on exchanges across borders and the increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange that has emerged as a result

Markets become more powerful in influencing decisions about the future of the globe rather than governments...  

Markets expand outside of countries to ll over the globe.

revolutionaries wanted globalization to happen ... spread capitalism to other countries.  They believed that it would mean that everyone has a fair share of the worlds resources. 

The recent recession shows that no one can actually control the market we are in. 

‘Covering a wide range of distinct political, economic, and cultural trends, 

the term “globalization” has quickly become one of the most fashionable 

buzzwords of contemporary political and academic debate. In popular 

discourse, globalization often functions as little more than a synonym for 

one or more of the following phenomena: the pursuit of classical liberal 

(or “free market”) policies in the world economy (“economic 

liberalization”), the growing dominance of western (or even American) 

forms of political, economic, and cultural life (“westernization” or 

“Americanization”), the proliferation of new information technologies (the 

“Internet Revolution”), as well as the notion that humanity stands at the 

threshold of realizing one single unified community in which major 

sources of social conflict have vanished (“global integration”)’

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/globalization/

Because of globalization the world becomes Americanized. 

We are all now conntected via communication devices which makes globalization easier.

Mcdonaldization 

‘American sociologist George Ritzer coined the 

term “McDonaldization” to describe the wide-

ranging sociocultural processes by which the 

principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to 

dominate more and more sectors of American 

society as well as the rest of the world’

Manfred B. Steger, Globalization: A very Short Introduction, page 71

Brings American principles to other societies... 

Marshall McLuhan

Talks about the radio and invention of TV. Technology extends the capabilities of people. You can now see right around the globe. We can experience our effects on every other people in the world...

Experiencing effects of our behaviour in a global scale. Quite true!

Thought is should make us more aware of our responsibilities."Globe no bigger than a village."

Nothing is hidden and news is everywhere.

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But the problem is it kind of hasn't brought us together and maybe in fact segregated the world and communities even more.

Hatred can be spread from behind a screen without any obvious personal ramifications of your actions.

The Internet - 

We live mythically and integrally... In the electric age ,when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate... in the consequences of our every action. (1964: p.4) 

‘Electric technology... would seem to render individualism obsolete and... corporate interdependence mandatory’ (1962: p.1)

Through economic means and through land grabbing and war capitalism swallows up the rest of the world..

Because the market is expanding globally and they are multinational they are unaccounted for by any government. Starbucks is an example of this as they said they are 'based' in another country so don't need to pay taxes.

‘Does globalization make people around the world 

more alike or more different? … A group of 

commentators we might call “pessimistic 

hyperglobalizers” argue in favour of the former.  

They suggest that we are not moving towards a 

cultural rainbow that reflects the diversity of the 

world’s existing cultures.  Rather, we are

witnessing the rise of an increasingly homogenized 

popular culture underwritten by a Western “culture 

industry” based in New York, Hollywood, London 

and Milan’

Manfred B. Steger, Globalization: A very Short Introduction, page 70

Cultural Imperialism 

If the 'global village' is run with a certain set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as an assimilated one.

Key thinkers- 

Schiller

Chomsky

Another form of imperialism - creating an empire. Taking over empires and controlling them.. 

In the modern era imperialism is not for traditional means but actually for changing the way people think so the become more like your own culture... Western America culture mind set spreading over the world.

Time Warner

All the subsidiaries that Time Warner owns. 

Most multi media companies come from North America.

Being constantly bombarded with Western ideas, it is natural that it will begin to change the people in the rest of the world.  

US MEDIA POWER CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS A NEW FORM OF IMPERIALISM 

An American way of thinking and American ideas of consuming things. 

Big Brother has spread from western culture to the rest of the world.

You create a product in the rest, re-package it and send it round the rest of the world... 

He controls a third of the market. He boasts that whoever the Sun says the people should vote for will win the election. 

Murdoch is explicit about having the power to control the way people thinks.

You can only report what you are aloud to report.  If you accuse Barack Obama of war crimes ou would have to be very nice to him otherwise you would never get an interview with him again. 

The more you look at newspapers it is actually the advert that controls the news. bove the right hand side advert shows how an advert controls the news itself.

Flak

US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC) – 

comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford. The GCC was started up by Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations companies, to rubbish the credibility of climate scientists and 'scare stories' about global warming.

flak is characterized by concerted and intentional efforts to manage public information.

This company brought out loads of positive stories to make their companies look like they are not harming the planet.

Manipulative system. The media can shape peoples lives and the way that they think... Politicians are now becoming very media savvy because they know how powerful the media is.

Inconvenient truth 

Release less CO2

Plant more vegetation

Try to be CO2 neutral

Recycle

Buy a hybrid vehicle

Encourage everyone you know to watch

Flat Earthers 

Jim Inhofe ‘Global warming is one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetuated on the American public.’

Nigel Lawson ‘It is a propagandist’s term. It trips off the tongue nicely’

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Erin Balser, 'Capital Accumulation, Sustainability and Hamilton, Ontario: How Technology and Capitalism can Misappropriate the Idea of Sustainability'


BIOX Biofuel plant, Canada

Alternative ‘clean’ fuel

Renewable

More expensive to produce

Bio-fuel plant in Canada. It is more expensive to produce so people aren't prepared to buy it. When they built the new factory to make bio-fuel they built it in the cheapest part of Ontario, This caussed loads of niose pollution the off shoots were pumped into 

This is when a company tries to re brand them to make them look like they are better for the environment.

‘Most things are not designed for the needs of the people but for the needs of the manufacturers to sell to people’

‘Most things are designed not for the needs of the people but for the needs of manufacturers to sell to people’ (Papanek, 1983:46)

Adbusters attempt to make sustainable product above by creating a trainer made from used tires...

Artwork used within newspaper

Shepard Fairey using his work to try and spread the need to be sustainable to a wider audience.. 

OUGD501 // Lecture 11 // Censorship & Truth

Overview of Lecture

Notions of censorship and truth
The indexical qualities of photography in rendering truth
Photographic manipulation and the documentation of truth
Censorship in advertising
Censorship in art and photography

Ansel Adams - Do you see it as quality photography or something that is cheap ...
Photographs moons to a great degree.

Negative photographs

The idea of truth - does it delivery truth in terms of the delivery.

Same negative but imply different types of light.
Does it matter ?

Manipulation goes back to alter things

‘Five years before coming to power in the 1917 October revolution, the Soviets established the newspaper Pravda. For more than seven Decades,until the fall of Communism, Pravda, which Ironically means “truth”, served the Soviet Communist party by censoring and filtering the news presented to Russian and Eastern Europeans’

Aronson, E. and Pratkanis, A., 1992, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, New York, Henry Holt & Co., pages 269 - 270

This person was deleted out of history by using manipulation

This manipulation is more apparent because of digital technology

This image takes recognizable things and gives them a twist...
This mocks advertising students. Changing the context of the media in a humerus and ironic way ..

This image of kate Winslet on GQ shows her with elongated legs to appeal more to men. This will have been done using the program illustrator

This image has been blended together with another to create a better image for a newspaper or magazine to sell

Robert Capa

The dury is out on this photograph if you are actually seeing the death of this man.
Do we need to know if this is death or is it goo propaganda for showing the faschism is bad ?

Propaganda and persuasion

‘At that time [World War II], I fervently believed just about everything I was exposed to in school and in the media. For example, I knew that all Germans were evil and that all Japanese were sneaky and treacherous, while all white Americans were clean-cut, honest, fair-minded, and trusting’

Elliot Aronson in Pratkanis and Aronson, (1992), Age of
Propaganda, p. xii

The photo was romanticized in the french magazine Vue ...

‘With lively step, breasting the wind, clenching their rifles, they ran down the slope covered with thick stubble. Suddenly their soaring was interrupted, a bullet whistled - a fratricidal bullet - and their blood was drunk by their native soil’ – caption accompanying the photograph in Vue magazine.

Jean Baudrillard

‘Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real
without origin or relativity: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.  Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra’

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1981, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press, page 169

‘Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.
These would be the succesive phases of the image:

It is the reflection of a basic reality.
It masks and perverts a basic reality.
It masks the absence of a basic reality.
It bears no relation to any reality whatever : it is its own pure simulacrum.’


Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1981, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press, page 173

He here talks about the stages of manipulation. In the end there is nothing true left ...

‘As we approach the likelihood of a new Gulf War, I have an idea and it occurs to me that the Digital Journalist may be the place for it. As we all know, the military pool system created then was meant to be, and was, a major impediment for photojournalists in their quest to communicate the realities of war (This fact does not diminish the great efforts, courage, and many important images created by many of my colleagues who participated in these pools.). Aside from that, while you would have a very difficult time finding an editor of an American publication today that wouldn't condemn this pool system and its restrictions during the Gulf War, most publications and television entities more or less bought the program before the war began (this reality has been far less discussed than the critiques of the pools themselves)’

Peter Turnley, The Unseen Gulf War, December 2002,

In the first world war there was many photo journalists and were governed by the American military. This meant that the government decided which photographs they wanted the public to see..

First time which images were used and published to show the true devastation of war.

“It is a masquerade of Information: branded faces delivered over to the prostitution of the image”


Jean Baudrillard, The
Gulf War Did not Take Place, 1995, p.40


This explains the idea that it is a simulation war or a reproduction of a war.
"It is the bellicose equivalent of safe sex: make war like love with a condom! On the Richter scale, the Gulf War would not even reach two or three. "

In reality it was what the media wanted the war to be. In reality it was a very sanitized war

This appeared on the front of British Newspapers. To be faced with this was very shocking. Regulators deemed this as to gruesome for the front of a newspaper.
Deemed to be to shocking but it was in fact the reality of the war...

"Alas, much of American audience today cannot distinguish between computer war games and real war, between news and entertainment’."

This documents a different type of war. It is more fine art photography so it is a beautiful image rather than recording war how it is... Making art out of war ...

Censhorship
The practice or policy of censoring films,letters, or publications


Treffry, D. (ed.) (2001), Paperback English Dictionary, Glasgow: Harper
Collins

Censor
A person authorised to examine films, letters, or publications, in order to ban or cut anything considered obscene or objectionable

To ban or cut portions of (a film, letter or publication)

Treffry, D. (ed.) (2001), Paperback English Dictionary, Glasgow: Harper
Collins

Morals
Principles of behaviour in accordance with
standards of right and wrong

Treffry, D. (ed.) (2001), Paperback English Dictionary, Glasgow: Harper
Collins

Ethics

A code of behaviour, especially of a particular group, profession or individual.
The moral fitness of a decision, course of action etc.
The study of the moral value of human conduct.
Treffry, D. (ed.) (2001), Paperback English Dictionary, Glasgow: Harper
Collins

Cadburys Flake adverts ,,

Women in bath with romantic music as she puts a flake into the mouth

‘Suppose that a picture of a young woman inserting a chocolate bar into her mouthmakes one person think of fellatio, but someone else says that this meaning says more about the observer than it does the picture. This kind of dispute, with its assumption that meaning resides in a text quite independently of individual and group preconceptions, is depressingly common in discussions on advertising.

Oliviero Toscani, United Colors of Benetton advert 1992

“Decorative models do seem to increase recognition and recall of the advertisement itself. The same probably is true for nudity. Thus , as one article on that technique suggested, ‘While an illustration of a nude female may gain the interest and attention of a viewer, an advertisement depicting a nonsexual scene appears to be more effective in obtaining brand recall”’.

Phillips, M. J. (1997), Ethics and Manipulation in Advertising: Answering a Flawed Indictment, London, Quorum Books, page 121

This image was placed on the side as it was too sexual when left lieng down.
At the tme it was the most complained about image in advertisement history ..
Is it more acceptable when you are tricked to think that it is not as sexual ?

Jemaine Grier talked about how images of nude women in advertisement is not allowed while you can visit the national gallery and view images like the one above... Incestuous scene of mother and son. This is deemed to be a masterpiece and yet if it is displayed in any other context it would be deemed inappropriate.

This artist treads a dangerous line. They only become acceptable because they are painted. They would be deemed unacceptable if they were a photograph

The girl featured on the photo on the right was only "15" years old which would not be accepted today yet fine in the photograph ...

Amy Adler – The Folly of Defining ‘Serious’ Art


Professor of Law at New York University

‘an irreconcilable conflict between legal rules and artistic practice’

The requirement that protected artworks have ‘serious artistic value’ is the very thing contemporary art and postmodernism itself attempt to defy


The Miller Test 1973

Asks three questions to determine whether a given work should be labelled ‘obscene’, and hence denied constitutional protection:

Whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct
Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value

Obscenity Law

‘To protect art whilst prohibiting trash’
‘The dividing line between speech and non-speech’
‘The dividing line between prison and freedom’

Who decides what is serious art and what isn't ?

- These cause a stir because they show semi erotic values
- The argument is that your parents have nude photographs of you but this does not justify placing them in exhibitions and blowing them up

- Laws and society has changed in the way we view things.
- In an age where schools won't place photographs of children without consent
- Artists are still aloud to photograph their children nude and place it on websites

‘Upper crust “art lovers” are paying £5 a head to ogle degrading snaps of children plastered across the walls of one of Britain’s most exclusive galleries’

‘A revolting exhibition of perversion under the guise of art’

News of the World
- To place these images large in a gallery is seen as perverted...

- ‘I think that the pictures are incredibly innocent and totally unsexual. I don’t crop them, I don’t retouch them and the shots are never staged. I might introduce an element like a mask, to a given situation, but I would never insist that the child put it on’

Tierney Gearon, Guardian, 2001

Richard Prince, spiritual Prince, 1983
- ‘A bath-damp and decidedly underage Brooke Shields … when Prince invites us to ogle Brooke Shields in her prepubescent nakedness, his impulse has less to do with his desire to savour the lubricious titillations that it was shot to spark in its original context … than with a profound fascination for the child star’s story’

If you try and look at this image on the website you get this view

Final Thoughts
- Just how much should we believe the ‘truth’ represented in the media?
- And should we be protected from it?
- Is the manipulation of the truth fair game in a Capitalist, consumer society?
- Should art sit outside of censorship laws exercised in other disciplines?
- Who should be protected, artist, viewer, or subject?